Hundreds of people die at sea every year due to vessel and airplane accidents. Emergency teams have little time to rescue those in the water because the probability of finding a person alive plummets after six hours. Beyond tides and challenging weather conditions, unsteady coastal currents often make search and rescue operations exceedingly difficult.
New insight into coastal flows gleaned by an international research team led by George Haller, Pro-fessor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, promises to enhance the search and rescue techniques currently in use. Using tools from dynamical systems theory and ocean data, the team has developed an algorithm to predict where objects and people floating in water will drift. “Our work has a clear potential to save lives”, says Mattia Serra, former Ph.D. student at ETH and now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, who is the first author of a study recently published in
Nature Communications
.
Hidden traps lead to missing persons
In today’s rescue operations at sea, elaborate models of ocean dynamics and weather forecasting are used to predict the path of drifting objects. For fast-changing coastal waters, however, such predictions are often inaccurate due to uncertain parameters and missing data. As a result, a search may be launched in the wrong location, causing a loss of precious time.
